Exit at very short distance from the very well-known Lies of P of NEOWIZ, Lords of the Fallen promised to redeem the warm welcome of the first chapter by offering an entirely revised souls-like experience, thanks to a new development team, HEXWORKS, and the use ofUnreal Engine 5. After literally opening the dances in distant 2014 to a practically unstoppable succession of souls-like and souls-clones, the brand tried to become more mature, liming certain naiveties and proposing exclusive mechanics, however, also very interesting, rising above a mere derivative work (not entirely, but at least in part).
We spent thirty hours in the sad Mournstead, alternating between Axiom, the world of living, and Umbral, the world of the dead, and we arrived, exhausted, to write this review. Believe me when I tell you that to complete an souls, or souls-like, once begun, for the undersigned is almost a matter of life or death. There is pride, honor and perhaps an excessive dose of stubbornness. But there is a first time for everything, and this review will have as its purpose to tell you because Lords of the Fallen is the first souls-like I leave in the race. An unconditional surrender, a pitiful but necessary capitulation, for the mental health of the undersigned in the first place, but also not to let the accumulated frustration obnubilasse judgement on what good actually exists in the title of the study to which CI Games She trusted.
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Password: airtightism
FromSoftware has managed to divide the entire audience of video gamers between those who love Souls and those who do not tolerate them. Hexworks, with his Lords of the Fallen, worked on a smaller scale, splitting half the opinions about "soulslikers". One of the main elements that has always divided player opinions about this kind of Action RPG is the narrative. Crypt, not linear, sometimes confused but damn intriguing. Personally one of the elements that can bind me to the context of an souls and push me to its completion not one, not two, but also three or four times if necessary.
I have wandered long and wide for a shameful number of hours like Senzaluce in Elden Ring, I discovered the secrets of Lothric's reign as Ashen One in Dark Souls III, I hunted in the darkness of the alleys of Yharnam constantly looking for new sources of blood to escape madness in Bloodborne. But the fate of Mournstead and the Lantern Carrier, honestly, I've never been able to catch myself.
Lords of the Fallen is a direct follow-up to the title of 2014, but I doubt that someone actually remembers the events, they were almost ten years old and the title was certainly not an unmissable success. Do not fear, however, if you have no memories or even have not played the title: this will not affect your enjoyment of this reboot. Just know that the demonic god Adyr, defeated and chained by five sacred pillars of light, is regaining strength and preparing to return. The pillars have been corrupted and the lands of Mournstead have begun to crave with infamous and evil creatures.
Humanity, in a very stereotypical way, relies on faith, and men of faith rely on Power of the Lantern, a very powerful artifact that guarantees its bearer the possibility to cross the barrier separating the world of the living from that of the dead, a little like the Material Kingdom and the Spectral Kingdom of Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. We are the Carrier of the Lantern, the obscure crusade in charge of freeing the five pillars from corruption and preventing Adyr's awakening.
HEXWORKS, who has obviously studied the mechanics of souls, has applied the same paradigms of FromSoftware regarding the narrative but, unfortunately, has cast a little too much the hand (as for other he has done in many other "soulistic" derivation areas, but we will arrive). The screenwriters of the studio would envy Quasimodo or Saba for their hermeticism. To unravel the lotus mob becomes really complex and, to tell the truth, not even so interesting, so often we move for scenarios without enjoying them, without perceiving or appreciating those cleverly hidden details in full sight that made FromSoftware the deserved success.
The various NPCs that we will encounter along our journey do not differ from the corporate guidelines and have the same loquacity of the tizia that miraculously made match with you on Tinder. But in fact, perhaps, interesting things to tell you has more of her.
Enough questionable then the choice to hide behind the development of a certain statistics the descriptions of objects and equipment, a fundamental source of praise in any souls-like who wants to say so. In this way, if you want to know more about the world of play and its inhabitants, you will literally have to pay a "tax" in terms of experience points spent to level the Radiation, statistics necessary to read, in essence. No, thank you.
Mournstead Marathon
As for the core of the gameplay, the fight, most of those who approach the title will know well what to expect.
And he'll be wrong.
If we are not at the speed and combo levels of a Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, we are definitely not even close to the reasoned and strategic shield of Dark Souls or Demon Souls. Even with heavy weapons, the Lantern Carrier enjoys a discreet agility, sometimes too much, so much so that we end up from the cliffs because a sword fender leads us to advance two meters. Speed that has probably been adjusted on the basis of the number of enemies we will face at the same time as average, or TROPPI.
In the first areas the number is still acceptable, but things degenerate very soon, letting us face by ourselves entire hosts of demonic creatures, and unfortunately we are not Gatsu of Berserk. Friends that then seem to be arranged in the levels almost randomly, I like to imagine HEXWORKS devs as Saltbae as it rains the salt on a lustrous steak. Believe me when I tell you that it doesn't really make sense, as well as the fact of almost manic hiding enemies behind corners or destructible objects. Here too the students of the Spanish study studied by the greats and thought to do better simply doing more. The so-called "gotcha moments" are there, they are an integral part of every souls and they serve to never let us lower the guard, but what the hell should be dosed also those, otherwise lose any intrinsic value.
If to this we add the fact that The dress (read Falò) are very few and very distant from each other, you will understand the most logical approach to take is to ignore the fighting beautifully and slander all enemies until the next checkpoint or the next shortcut, and many dear greetings to exploration and appreciation of the design of the levels. And also about levels, if Hexworks mastered the concept of level design of From home, it definitely brought it to the extreme, creating infernal dedals instead of levels, within which we will often find ourselves wandering without a miss a map to show us a glimpse of light at the bottom of the tunnel (the map is, in fact, but calling it so is an offense to all the maps of the world). It has happened several times to forward us to areas that seemed to be the natural continuation of the main route and then finish, after perhaps several dozen deaths, in clamorosi cul de sac, with only rewards a weapon ( absolutely useless magari for our build) and 45 minutes of our time thrown to the nettles.
There are cases, however, in which he is obliged to fight: boss-fights. These are divided into main and secondary ones, with the bosses of the secondary ones who become immediately, once defeated, generic mob. "So, de botto, no sense". In general, apart from the opening (which is clearly ""inspired"" to a famous boss of Elden Ring), I found the boss-fight of the title not memorable and, above all, too simple. Here Hexworks demonstrates that he has not understood what fundamentally makes a soul difficult and fulfilling. The challenge with the boss, testing himself with a being well above our abilities and slowly succeeding in knowing it, predicting it and finally taming it, blurring any death nothing but our mistake or distraction.
On the contrary, in Lords of the Fallen the bosses represent the simplest part of the game, while the path that leads us to their presence, which should be a well calibrated growth of forces that oppose our ascent, instead becomes the main "difficulty" of the title. But is it an artificial difficulty, constituted by clashes always and only in net numerical inferiority, enemy ranged always out of reach and equipped with absurd precision, enemies who ignore obstacles in the flickering of blows and do not harm each other if not in scripted cases, the lock-system that makes its own head passing an enemy to each other at will, sending to rolls every sort of strategy in the precedence of elimination of the targets, hitbox to
Probably all these elements are put on the balance plate to compensate for the fact that the Lantern Carrier can die twice (the first will bring us into the world of Umbral, the second will be definitive), the fact that the slave has a number of frames of invincibility well above the average (but it is not free, happening only in an orthogonal way to the direction of the protagonist), the fact that one can unbalance the enemies by breaking their balance by force of mazzate and parry and then inflict on them a "devading blow" (mechanical already seen in Sekiro and in the most recent Lies of P, but that here sees a risk-benefit relationship totally unfavorable). It almost seems that the game was balanced with the idea that each player would face Mournstead's lande mortals along with a friend. We, on the other hand, had no way to test the multiplayer mode and it almost comes to us to say menomal: during the test period many players complained about a bug that resetted much of the progress of their characters after participating in a cooperative session.
Nightmare.
A lantern for domarli
Perhaps the most successful and original aspect of Lords of the Fallen is the use of Lantern, more regarding navigation through the two worlds of Axiom and Umbral, than for its use in combat, a little too woody and counterintuitive.
The passage to the desolate world of Umbral can take place at any time at the simple pressure of a key, or at death, when we have a second chance to hold the souls accumulated until then. There's also a third reason why the mimick could be missing? Of course not but, for the umpteenth time, Hexworks too shakes his hand with his interpretation of this canonical gimmick. The mechanism is the same as the abyss fishing frog: the mimick will attract you with the typical kitchen of a drop, practically indistinguishable by a real reward. But once you try to recover the precious prize, a spectral being will attack straight outta Umbral, Killing you on the blow, and then indirectly inviting you to his house.
Beautiful the Umbral eh, but I would not live there: full of spectral monsters, which have the bad habit of refusing continuously; half of our vity will become "advanced", or will enter into a limbo where we can recover it inflicting damage but only a single blow to lose it all; the time spent inside it will intensify the spawn of enemies, involving not only much more dangerous moals.
It is imperative to get out as soon as possible, but this can only be done in two ways: dying, and we don't want it, or finding an effigy that allows us to return to Axiom and, I don't even have to tell you, these effigies are more rare than a Black Lotus Gem Mint. In 99% of the time we will be obliged to enter Umbral to overcome an unparalleled obstacle in Axiom, like a cliff or a destroyed bridge. If you want, you can also slip into the realm of the dead to explore hidden areas looking for precious or rare loot. Is it worth it? For us not, but we admit that discover entire sections of map hidden under the water of a lake or behind a seemingly invaluable gate has its charm.
As for combat, however, the lantern may serve you to momentarily screw up the health of the enemies, so as to deprive them of good life tranches with a single stroke, or more often to blow up Umbral parasites that will force Axiom enemies making them likely invulnerable. We have not been fully convinced of this use, and in fact we have used it as little as possible also because, almost forgotten, during the use of the lantern you will be vulnerable to specific monsters of Umbral that have the bad habit, like the mimick, to take you inside the world of the dead against your will, however losing you less life.
I mean, for the umpteenth time, the game is not worth the candle.
Technically speaking
We tested Lords of the Fallen on the following configuration:
AMD Ryzen 7 3700x @ 3.60 GHz
Gigabyte RTX AORUS Master 3080 Ti 12Gb
Corsair Vengeance RGB RT 32GB DDR4 3600MHz
LG 34GN850 resolution monitor 3440x1440 (21:9)
Despite the specifications being well above the requirements, Lords of the Fallen has made us a lot of pain in his frame-rate very reluctant to exceed 60fps (minimum mayoral, according to us, for an souls-like, where life and death can be played "on the frame") but very willing to fall frequently even in the range of 20-30fps, regardless of settings set and use of DLSS technology. We didn't miss stuttering and sparuti crashing. It's okay that Unreal Engine 5 is a "new" toy, but here optimization is not found, neither in Axiom nor in Umbral. During the testing period we installed practically one patch per day but, largely, the problems remained.
From a strictly artistic point of view the team chose for a classic dark fantasy that I personally enjoyed but, for the reasons mentioned above, I could not explore how I wanted to. Also excellent design of weapons and armor, the build construction possibilities are really great and there is great space for those who prefer aesthetics to functionality.
Modesto the sound, no trace has particularly impressed us, no one will remain impressed in the memory, as well as performances at dubbing, without praise and without infamy. The title is located in Italian.
In conclusion
Lords of the Fallen is a title I would have liked more, but many, too many design choices have prevented me from doing so. HEXWORKS proves to be a talented study, able to assimilate and reproduce with great mechanical fidelity already seen in other works, but without being able to amalgamate them properly, ending in problems of artefact difficulty or lack of character. We appreciate the efforts made in the weeks following the launch to try to smooth the most obvious problems but, as confirmed by the same developers, many items have wanted, on many design choices the team will not take a step back. And then this time I do it, first as a player that as a reviewer ♪, bringing me behind for life the burden of not having concluded an souls that I had begun.
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